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Tuesday, October 23, 2018

To Kill a Mockingbird – the latest victim of the cultural appropriation canard

The Peel District School Board has decided the
classic young adult novel To Kill a
Mockingbird is “a racist text” written from a “white supremacist” perspective,
that it’s “oppressive” and inflicts “violence” on black readers. Anyone who’s
read the novel knows this is a slander, that actually Mockingbird smacks down racism as the dehumanizing curse it is.

So what gives?

Answer, the author of Mockingbird was white.
Therefore, she was a racist – or so current identity politics would
have us believe. White people shouldn't write a novel about racism; any such novel is itself racist or, at the very least, it's suspect. Always. Even if the content {as with Mockingbird}is clearly and explicitly anti-racist. It's who's writing that counts, because according to this ideology, race defines us. Black or White – that’s what really
matters. Does this way of looking at things sound racist to you? It does to me, but it’s the current orthodoxy in how schools look at “equity” issues –
and it’s what they’re teaching our kids.

Mind you teachers in the Peel Board can go ahead
and teach Mockingbird – if they dare –
though if they do, they should teach it through a “critical,” “anti-oppression
lens” meaning, they should teach it as if it’s a racist, white-supremacist text,
because you know, it was written by a white woman.

Rosie Dimanno – a writer I always admire even
when I disagree with her – nails it in this column for The Toronto Star….

“Latest anti–To Kill a Mockingbird campaign
rings as hollow as the rest”

“To Kill a Mockingbird is a text that
requires deep knowledge of anti-oppression pedagogy so that educators can create
learning spaces for students to interrogate the theme of racism as well as
biases, assumptions and stereotypes around Black peoples within history and
contemporary contexts.”

Harper Lee,
who knew a thing or two about words, would never have written such a sentence.

The late author
was not a pedagogue nor a polemicist.

Instead, she produced a
classic novel about racism in the American South and a small-town Alabama
lawyer who defends a poor Black man falsely accused of raping a white-trash
woman.

The book, for whichLee was awardeda
Pulitzer Prize in 1961, has never ceased to draw controversy. At first the
objections arose from accusations of immorality and “filthy” content. More
recently, To Kill a
Mockingbird has been condemned for its racial slurs — the
N-word is mentioned 19 times — the purported harm it causes to racialized
students when taught in schools and employing a “white saviour trope,” making
Atticus Finch the hero of a story told through the eyes of his daughter Scout,
as both a child witness and adult narrator.

In one of the earlier ban-the-book
decisions by a Virginia school board, Harper herself responded with a saucy young letter to
her local newspaper: “Recently I have received echoes down this way of the
Hanover County School Board’s activities, and what I’ve heard makes me wonder
if any of its members can read.”

I wonder the same thing about
Poleen Grewal, associate director of instructional and equity support services
at Peel District School Board.

All these years after its
publication, a seminal moment in fiction for its sympathy towards Black people,
its stinging rebuke of a racist justice system and a clarity of moral thinking,
a righteous pedant has taken up the anti-Mockingbird crusade again, dancing on
the head of a didactic pin.

The core fault of the novel,
Grewal argues in a densefour-page directiveaimed
at Peel teachers, is that the story is told through a privileged white person’s
eyes. Because privilege is allegedly the common denominator of all white
people. It just is.

It is not.

Harper Lee

This case,
specifically, presupposes that white people are incapable of empathy or
intellectual rigour; that teachers, in particular, can’t be trusted to present
the novel in a way which invites frank discussion.

It asserts that, as critical
thinkers, we are slaves to the colour of our skin and a Black middle-school
student — the novel is typically taught in Grade 8 or 9 — can intrinsically
have no point of human commonality with a white middle-school student.

“The use of racist texts as entry points into
discussions about racism is hardly for the benefit of Black students who
already experience racism. This should give us pause — who does the use of
these texts centre? Who does it serve? Who do we continue to teach them?”

What’s being declared here is
a white appropriation of Black experiences, at a time when the canon of
appropriation has become poison in the arts. It defies the power of
imagination, the ability — indeed, the necessity — of walking in another
person’s shoes, of inhabiting a character’s life outside what is personally
known.

There are, in fact, few
writers who embrace that doctrine, but those few have co-opted the
conversation, abetted by academics of rigid, radical beliefs.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a beautiful, tender novel about childhood and valour and
the gaining of wisdom, hung on a plot that encompasses brutality — not just the
dignified suffering of Tom Robinson, the defendant, but also the shut-in Boo
Radley, who rescues Scout and her brother Jem from a vicious revenge assault.
In the telling, Lee delves into the swamp of ignorance and poverty and a
race-based class system, showing how the citizens turn to racism to mask their
own shame and low self-esteem.

That’s certainly a teaching
moment which should resonate against the backdrop of today’s surging nativism.

“White writers write from their own schemas,
their own perspectives and white supremacist frameworks that reflect the
specificity of their culture and history on racialized peoples.”

Again, a theory, a withering
bias, projected as fact.

Book-banners and book-burners
have always cloaked themselves in piety and propriety. They see themselves as
gatekeepers, parsing ideas, weighing conventions, morally superior and
intellectually paramount. But it’s just another form of jackboot orthodoxy
masquerading, pedagogically, as an elevated conscience.

That’s precisely the mob
mentality which continues to challenge for removal from schools and libraries
such quality titles as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Lives of Girls and Women by Nobel laureate Alice
Munro, Khaled Hosseini’s The
Kite Runner, Beloved by
Toni Morrison, Brave New
World by Aldous Huxley, The Color Purple, The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, even the Bible.

All have appeared on the
American Library Association’s annual list of the Top Ten Most Challenged Books
and still do so. To Kill a
Mockingbird has rarely slipped from the list.

Doubtless Grewal would lose
her nut at being slotted into the same bracket of literary witch-hunters. But
it is all of a piece, all of the same stern ideology.

As of this moment, Grewal’s
treatise remains a directive only. Yet it’s abundantly clear that teachers will
have to justify themselves to the board if they do include To Kill a Mockingbird on
the curriculum. And it’s not as if the very types of novels that Grewal would
prefer, by Black identity authors, are being excluded.

Lord help the teacher if an
offended parent complains about To Kill a Mockingbird.

There’s no evidence here the
board will have his or her back.

“The idea that banning books is about
censorship and that censorship limits free speech is often decried as a poor
reason to keep the novel on schools’ reading list as its racist themes make it
violent and oppressive for Black students.”

Beware word-shapers who twist
the meaning of censorship.

***

Rosie DiManno is a columnist based in Toronto covering sports and current affairs.
Follow her on Twitter:@rdimanno

1 comment:

Last night (Tuesday Oct. 23) "To Kill a Mockingbird" was acclaimed America's favourite novel as part of the PBS Greatest Read challenge.That was my choice and remains my favourite novel. It is one that every student, every person should read. Bah to Grewal. Lee's book shines as a light against racism.

Brian Henry has been a book editor, writer, and creative writing instructor for more than 25 years. He teaches creative writing at Ryerson University. He also leads weekly creative writing courses in Burlington, Mississauga, Oakville and Georgetown and conducts Saturday workshops throughout Ontario. His proudest boast is that he has helped many of his students get published.